Enhancing students' conceptual understanding is one of the primary goals of science education. Existing literature suggests that the degree of knowledge integration among students can reflect their level of conceptual understanding. This study focuses on the concept of friction force, constructing a cognitive structure model of friction force to…

Development of cognitive skills is critical for developing the right conceptual ideas in chemistry. Atomic structure, bonding, and associated properties are taught as parts of high school chemistry courses worldwide. The cumulative build-up of misconceptions about the periodic table is to blame for students' poor performance on atoms and…

Interview data exemplify students' attempts to integrate the concepts of electrochemistry with related knowledge that they had previously constructed or acquired in other classes. The implications for minimizing potential misconceptions center on the difficulties students experience when using more than one model for explaining scientific…

Three groups of sixth, eighth, and tenth graders took pre- and posttests on a Piagetian problem and a problem that evoked a misconception. Two intervention groups engaged in group transactions intended to create inter- and intrapersonal conflicts or took a multiple-choice test. Results indicated that treatment groups progressed on the Piagetian…

The main purposes of this study were to determine: (1) how high school students represent the physical phenomena of phase changes; (2) how they modify their representation of these physical phenomena to accommodate new observation; (3) what factors lead to student difficulty in modifying representations; and (4) how the…

The Water and Molecular Networks (WAMNet) Project uses graduate student written Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) computer simulations of the molecular structure of water to assist high school students learn about the nature of water. This study examined: (1) preconceptions concerning the molecular structure of water common among high…